Studying Chinese-English Mixed Language Queries from the User Perspectives

Abstract

With the increasing number of multilingual webpages on the Internet, cross-language information retrieval has become an important research issue. Using Activity Theory as a theoretical framework, this study employs semi-structured interviews with key informants who are frequent users of Chinese-English mixed language queries in web searching. The findings present the context of and reasons for using Chinese-English mixed language queries, which can inform the design of cross-language controlled vocabularies and information retrieval systems.